Lorenz beam

The Lorenz beam was a blind-landing radio navigation system developed by C. Lorenz AG in Berlin for bad weather landing.^[1] The first experimental system had been installed in 1932 at Berlin-Tempelhof Central Airport and was demonstrated at the International Air Service Conference in January, 1933. Further improvements of the system were accepted during the meetings in November. 1933 and September 1934. By 1937 in addition to German airports the Lorenz System was employed in Europe, e.g. London, Paris, Milan, Stockholm, Warsaw, Vienna and Zürich, as well as internationally in Japan and Russia, with additional systems in preparation in Australia, South America and South Africa.^[1] The Lorenz company referred to it simply as the Ultrakurzwellen-Landefunkfeuer, German for "ultra-short-wave landing radio beacon", or LFF. In the UK it was known as Standard Beam Approach (SBA).^[2]

Further work lead to the addition of a Glide Path to the Lorenz beam, for which a patent was awarded in 1937. ^[3]

Prior to the start of the Second World War the Germans deployed the system at many Luftwaffe airfields in and outside Germany and equipped most of their bombers with the radio equipment needed to use it. It was also adapted into versions with much narrower and longer-range beams that was used to guide the bombers on missions over Britain, under the name Knickebein and X-Gerät.

Beam navigation provides a single line in space, making it useful for landing or enroute navigation, but not as a general purpose navigation system that allows the receiver to determine their location. This led to a rotating version of the same system for air navigation known as Elektra, which allowed the determination of a "fix" through timing. Further development produced a system that worked over very long distances, hundreds or thousands of kilometres, known as Sonne (or often, Elektra-Sonnen) that allowed aircraft and U-boats to take fixes far into the Atlantic. The British captured Sonne receivers and maps and started to use it for their own navigation under the name Consol.

The system began to be replaced soon after the war by modern instrument landing systems, which provide both horizontal positioning like LFF as well as vertical positioning and distance markers as well. Some LFF systems remained in use, with the longest-lived at RAF Ternhill not going out of service until 1960.